For The Unbelievers and Believers, A Struggle About Life

[Annie]

Something for everyone. Personally it made me cry.



http://tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article463230.ece

Pray if you must

A dying professor believes in the law. His students believe in God. The only faith they share is in each other.

By John Barry, Times Staff Writer

Published Friday, April 18, 2008 2:36 PM

TALLAHASSEE

Some of Steven Gey's students have asked his permission to pray for him, to beg God to spare him, to pray for the only thing that may save him — an Old Testament, open-the-heavens miracle.

Gey has Lou Gehrig's disease. He is 52. His ability to move and speak, even to eat and breathe, has eroded for almost two years. The disease has begun to starve and strangle him. Three days ago, he was taken to the hospital for insertion of a feeding tube.

He has arrived at the moment when people start to talk to God.

His students, many of whom are conservative Christians, are watching him die. They'd like to help him start the conversation. But he won't.

Gey doesn't pray for anything. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney and law professor at Florida State University, he ranks among the nation's top defenders of separation of church and state, of scientific inquiry, of rationalist, non-Christian governance.

He and those students come from opposite sides of the ramparts. A struggle over radically incompatible ideologies has torn the country apart. Evolution. Abortion. Stem cell research. It's a struggle that seems to offer no answer.

Gey and his students are facing his illness together. It has bonded believer and nonbeliever, followers of faith and followers of humanism. It has negated the mutual disdain that characterizes religious differences.

How can his Christian students not want to pray for him?

...

 

[rayboyusmc]

Let's say there is an afterlife.

Do you think a just God will punish this man for honestly believing as he does?

His non-faith seems as strong as his students' faith.

Here is a good example of how two seperate groups can actually co-exist without the hate and name calling.

 

[Annie]

Let's say there is an afterlife.

Do you think a just God will punish this man for honestly believing as he does?

His non-faith seems as strong as his students' faith.

Here is a good example of how two seperate groups can actually co-exist without the hate and name calling.

Your last line was my point in posting it in the first place.

 

[mattskramer]

Something for everyone. Personally it made me cry.

http://tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article463230.ece

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Even though it is in the Bible, I think that it is good applicable advice.

 

[Truthmatters]

Gey's artist wife, Irene Trakas, says her husband's beliefs and his closeness to students who don't share them probably go back to his very different childhood in Pensacola.

He grew up in a Baptist household, but in high school, Gey was enrolled in a program for gifted students who were allowed to take college-level courses. Many of his classmates were Jewish. He had never known Jewish kids before, but became exposed to the Jewish traditions of independent thought and questioning of religious ideas. He also was suddenly exposed to anti-Semitism.

He didn't want to become Jewish any more than he wanted to be Christian. "His intellect would not allow him to say that any one religion made a lot of sense," says his wife. But the exposure to a beleaguered religious minority roused his sense of justice. "He believed people ought to be able to believe whatever they want."

Maybe that's why he has become close to his Christian law students, she says.

"I think the students have come to feel he's not judging them. He will dismiss ideas that don't make sense to him, but only in the context of whether they belong in a legal system. He respects the choice of blind faith."

• • •

Gey was a much-quoted constitutional law expert during the battle over continuance of life support for Terri Schiavo. But no one is an expert on how to die.

His disease offers only agonizing choices.

Lou Gehrig's disease is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive, incurable disease that destroys motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking has the hereditary kind, which is devastating, but not life-threatening. Gey has the nonhereditary kind, which kills by slow paralysis.

One of the few hopeful avenues of ALS research has involved the transplanting of embryonic stem cells. Such research has been limited for seven years in the United States by religious conservatives and the Bush administration.

His adversaries have erased his last chance.

"The irony doesn't escape me."




Sounds like a great mind is being silenced here.

 

[AllieBaba]

Let's say there is an afterlife.

Do you think a just God will punish this man for honestly believing as he does?

His non-faith seems as strong as his students' faith.

Here is a good example of how two seperate groups can actually co-exist without the hate and name calling.

Unsaved is unsaved, as pertains to your question about God punishing someone who is a good person, but unsaved.
Here is the way it was explained to me, and which makes the most sense to me:
You cannot have a righteous God, or a God who is a judge, if he does not admonish his children and separate out the wheat from the chaff.
Sadly, those who have heard the word but reject it are the chaff.
It's good that this gentleman's students are praying for him. I'm sure one of the things they are praying for is his salvation, and they must care deeply for him. This brings the Holy Spirit into play, and he will work on bringing this man to God...Many people come to believe at the end of their lives in just this way.
When you are made anxious by this, try not to forget, the saved are accountable for their sins as well. We will all suffer judgment in the end. The only difference between unsaved and saved, in the eyes of CHristians, is that ultimately Christians will attain heaven and be allowed to live forever in God's presence. The unsaved will not.
Don't believe this doesn't break the hearts of Christians all around the world. We all have unsaved loved ones, and we all pray for unsaved everywhere. So while you may be angry at our belief that the unsaved are, well, unsaved, please don't assume we're happy about it.

 

[jillian]

I wouldn't want any part of any G-d who was so vengeful as to deny salvation to righteous people. Luckily my religion doesn't ask me to.

 

[Anguille]

I wouldn't want any part of any G-d who was so vengeful as to deny salvation to righteous people. Luckily my religion doesn't ask me to.

I think that if there was a god, it wouldn't be so petty and ungodlike as to care one way or the other if anyone believed in it.

 

[MsWikia]

Let's look at it like this, Sarah happens to be some random nice person that you do not know, would you let her in your house?? Would you let her borrow your car?? Probably NOT, because you do not know her; however, Bob is not only a nice person but you know him, you have a relationship with him, so you might let him in your house or even borrow your car.

This example parallels with the God of the Bible, you may be a good person but He does not know you and you do not know Him, you do not believe in Him, you don’t have any faith in Him, your allegiance is to something or someone else, so why should He let you in His House? Makes sense to me. Keep in mind, faith, obedience and deeds go hand in hand in Christianity.

However, as someone posted earlier, the saved, as in the ones who have confessed that Jesus is Lord and believes that he rose from the dead for our sins, are praying for the unsaved, the ones who are good people yet, misguided and the ones who are lost and being self-destructive.

 

[Anguille]

Let's look at it like this, Sarah happens to be some random nice person that you do not know, would you let her in your house?? Would you let her borrow your car?? Probably NOT, because you do not know her; however, Bob is not only a nice person but you know him, you have a relationship with him, so you might let him in your house or even borrow your car.

This example parallels with the God of the Bible, you may be a good person but He does not know you and you do not know Him, you do not believe in Him, you don’t have any faith in Him, your allegiance is to something or someone else, so why should He let you in His House? Makes sense to me. Keep in mind, faith, obedience and deeds go hand in hand in Christianity.

However, as someone posted earlier, the saved, as in the ones who have confessed that Jesus is Lord and believes that he rose from the dead for our sins, are praying for the unsaved, the ones who are good people yet, misguided and the ones who are lost and being self-destructive.

Well, isn't that special!

 

[Uknow_me72]

I have said several times that the God in the Bible is a false God.

The after life is not as important to you know as how much God affects you in this life. You had life before this one. You will have life after this one. God does not punish but he will remove his umbrella of protection from you and let you fend for ourself if you so choose not to believe in him. It is not him doing the bad things to you then.

There is no hell. That was a scare-tatic made by the RC to make you join there religion so they can control you.

 

[Anguille]

I have said several times that the God in the Bible is a false God.

The after life is not as important to you know as how much God affects you in this life. You had life before this one. You will have life after this one. God does not punish but he will remove his umbrella of protection from you and let you fend for ourself if you so choose not to believe in him. It is not him doing the bad things to you then.

There is no hell. That was a scare-tatic made by the RC to make you join there religion so they can control you.

Anyone can say what they want about what God is or does because there isn't any god to contradict them.

 

[MsWikia]

I think that if there was a god, it wouldn't be so petty and ungodlike as to care one way or the other if anyone believed in it.

Your statement implies that you believe there is a higher power and that higher power should be held to some standard?

 

[Uknow_me72]

Anyone can say what they want about what God is or does because there isn't any god to contradict them.

Heince the words False God.

I say the words. They mean something. We have a lot to learn. In time you will see the Truth but Faith doesn't ask for now. Faith waits for the time.

 

[Anguille]

Heince the words False God.

I say the words. They mean something. We have a lot to learn. In time you will see the Truth but Faith doesn't ask for now. Faith waits for the time.

Sounds kind of creepy to me.